5 questions with Colin Coyne of Birmingham's The Coyne Group: Key to success is asking the right questions

Colin Coyne poses at the site of his proposed One Birmingham Place near the Birmingham Railroad Park. (The Birmingham News/Beverly Taylor)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Colin Coyne is full of ideas.

Sitting outside Railroad Park on Wednesday morning, the winner of Birmingham's Prize2theFuture contest rolled out metaphors to describe different ideas, from how to finance education to finding ways to develop new agriculture industries.

"The quality of the answer is directly correlated to the quality of the question," Coyne said. "... Are we really thinking through the right question? If you're not, then even if you come up with a great answer, all you come up with is a well executed mistake."

Coyne won the $50,000 top prize in the Prize2theFuture contest with his proposal for the creation of One Birmingham Place. As part of the competition, the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham solicited ideas from around the world on how to transform a parking lot next to Railroad Park.

Coyne's idea was chosen from about a thousand submissions from at least 38 countries, 20 U.S. states and 78 Alabama cities. The Community Foundation pledged $1 million toward the project, which Coyne says could cost more than $17 million to build.

One Birmingham Place is an eight-element, multi-use facility that taps into performance, social media, visual arts, community theater and community organizations. Each piece is meant to help Birmingham residents "find a language to engage one another," he said. One element is called the HUB, offering centralized, flexible office space for community organizations.

His Coyne Group -- a strategy, consulting and visioning firm in Birmingham -- works to help clients glimpse opportunities that others might not otherwise see. The firm's clients range in size and type, including corporations, municipalities and industry trade groups. A recent project of Coyne's was the Vestavia Hills Library in the Forest, for which he led visioning.

He was previously involved in the development of the Watermark Outlet Mall and a plan to remake downtown's old Federal Reserve property that never materialized.

Coyne says his work stems from asking the right questions.

In an interview, Coyne talked about the concept of One Birmingham Place and how ideas can be formed and implemented for companies, organizations and thinkers in Alabama.

Q. How do you find the "right" questions?

We really want to understand not just the global culture but also the corporate culture. The trick there is to ask questions that are broad enough to attack areas that wouldn't have otherwise been thought of, but are specific enough to get meaningful answers. You've heard the expression: "We want people thinking outside the box." The problem is if you have everybody thinking outside the box, nobody's in the box.

We embrace the notion that ignorance is your greatest asset: if you're ignorant to something, you have no preconceived notion of how it's always been done or the way it should always be. So you can come in and go: Well, why doesn't the emperor have any clothes on?

Q. How did you decide to enter into the Prize2theFuture competition?

I heard of the competition and my mind just started going. I thought: This is what they ought to do with it, and using our methodology -- it has to be indigenous to the community, you have to understand the context and needs of the community, you have to understand how it fits into the park. All of the strategy and visioning work we do is very consistent with that.

I had sketched it all on this white board in the office. My wife said, "It does no good sitting up there. Shut down the business for two days, devote 100 percent of your thought to articulating this stuff, and do this. You need to do this." People want to talk, talk, but nobody wants to do.

Q. How did you come up with the idea, One Birmingham Place?

The idea is to create something that by being new and fresh and individually defined each time gives people a reason to come back once, twice, 10, 20 times, because it's different every time. Whether it's a different show at the theater, whether it's a different video you want to create or has been created. Whether it's a different meal you want to have. You celebrate that.

The final (long-term) element is you have all these groups who want to do the right thing. The idea of the HUB is to take these organizations, like the Community Foundation, like Leadership Birmingham, like BBA, like Urban Studio, like Main Street Birmingham, and give them a place where they can still have their individual offices and identity, but put them in the same proximity so it is more efficient for them economically because there are shared resources you can use. More importantly, there is the emotional and intellectual efficiency of having great ideas percolating with one another.

Q. What did you like about the competition?

Remember when I said what makes us good is we ask better questions? The five questions that the Community Foundation posed were brilliant questions. They were the right questions. One of the things I think that is very important to understand the competition is it was a search for a great idea, not a great design, per se. A lot of organizations go about their business saying "give me a great design." Design is fantastic, but if it's not based on a fundamentally sound premise, that's why you see cities building white elephants all the time.

The Community Foundation did it right: they said, let's find the right idea and then we'll design to that idea. I would say our entry was made better because they forced me to look at the right questions.

Q. Why do you think this competition was so significant?

What was revolutionary for Birmingham is that it was an investment in thought. Perhaps because of the volatility of our past, we have been afraid to embrace change.

For the first time in the 10 years I've lived here, I've seen informed, intelligent risk-taking suddenly starting to rear its head. And to me that's incredibly, incredibly promising, if we can keep that momentum.